Lilies and Soap and Pee and Cherries
by Trompet
Summary: AU. In which John is the director at a funeral parlor and Sherlock is utterly smitten with him.  One-shot, at least at the moment. Some bad words and romantic pining, but nothing terribly explicit.


Written for my dear friend Yuu, when she needed some cheering up. This has a vague possibility for sequel.

Lilies and Soap and Pee and Cherries

Sherlock Holmes would rather wear a noose than a tie.

In his point of view, they basically served the same function, but whereas the noose made no mistake about what it was meant to do, the tie just slowly crept up on a person, closing around their neck until they couldn't breathe. His brother Mycroft insisted on his wearing them to funerals, and Sherlock complied only because he wanted to go to see _him._

'Him' being the handsome director at the funeral parlor.

Sherlock had seen him numerous times before, but hadn't put too much stock in him. He liked to try to take samples from the parlor's dead bodies, for experiments of course, and while Mycroft gave him exasperated, faintly disapproving looks, nobody actually _caught_ him, so nobody stopped him.

Until the funeral director had caught him trying to steal an old watch from the casket of a murder victim, and broke his wrist in the ensuing scuffle.

Sherlock, predictably, was smitten.

"You're pathetic," Mycroft mumbled to him disdainfully as he watched his brother gracefully loop his tie.

"And you're obese," Sherlock muttered back distractedly, pulling it out and straightening out the creases. The tie was a hideous shade of orange argyle, and it somehow pulled off the difficult task of clashing with both black and white.

"You really think wearing that ridiculous tie is going to get him to notice you? He'll have a hard time actually seeing you when he's clawing out his own eyes."

"Shut up, Mycroft," he snapped. He always hated his brother. There was something about hating an insufferable know-it-all that was strangely vindicating when the person in question actually knew it all. "Contrary to popular belief, you don't actually know everything."

He hummed neutrally, the sound he made when Sherlock had told a flat-out lie and both of them knew it. Predictably, this did little to calm his younger brother down.

But Sherlock took a deep breath and counted to thirty-five, the way his Mother always had when he deduced out loud that Father's honored guests were tangled in inter-marital affairs. He usually loved to see Mycroft bested, but he couldn't do it today, because Mycroft wasn't above hiring security to keep Sherlock out of his hair when he was on business, and the business of offering condolences was one of the most important in the vein of keeping connections. But if Sherlock was good and promised to keep insults to a minimum, he was allowed to tag along with little fuss.

Normally, Sherlock liked as much fuss as possible. He was told often that he had a flair for the dramatic, and he was inclined to agree. But if police had to drag him from the premises, then the director might form an opinion on him. And not the kind of opinion that would be acceptable or even welcomed, but the kind that people whispered about behind closed doors in boring suburban bedrooms. An _opinion_, italics included, always meant frowns filled with disapproval and eyes filled with disgust, and for some reason, the thought of the director having an _opinion_ on him was more concerning than it should have been.

So Sherlock was on his best behavior, which was less of 'best behavior' and more along the lines of 'I can do whatever I want as long as nobody catches me.' And there were all kinds of mischief you could get up to in a funeral parlor, if you were certain you wouldn't get caught. Even the director he was enamored with had only caught him when he'd tampered around with the actual corpse, which was just about as obvious as Sherlock Holmes would ever get. Nobody had ever caught him releasing bees into the room to see if they liked the nectar in the flowers by the coffin. Nobody had caught him drugging the free coffee with a little something he'd made at home, just to test it mind you. It made little sense to use an untested solution on a criminal. Please. He wasn't that stupid.

The funeral home was the same as it always was, smelling of lilies and soap and elderly people. If there was one smell Sherlock didn't like, it was old people. The always smelled wrinkly and raisin-like and faintly of pee, and it made him crinkle his upturned nose in distaste and gag into his handkerchief under the pretext of muffling a sneeze. He liked the smell of dead bodies, though, because they were faintly sweet from the chemicals. 'The company of dead people is always preferable to that of live ones' was rule number two of Sherlock's Code of Basic Human Interaction. Exception A to the rule was Mrs. Hudson, his landlady, who always smelled of ginger snaps instead of pee, and who gave him kisses on his forehead the way his Mummy had sometimes when he was in one of his moods. Exception B was currently standing in a neatly pressed suit, greeting mourners at the door and digging all the cherry jolly ranchers out of the little dish of candy.

His brown-blonde-gold-grey hair was ruffled, and it was unfair, completely and utterly, how that managed to shut down his thought process like a switch had been flicked. He looked like a teddy bear, a cuddly teddy bear in a suit who was looking at him gape and making an expression that clearly said 'Are you going to stop staring at me, or are you just deranged?'

That was an oddly specific type of teddy bear, wasn't it? Did they even give teddy bears expressions? He couldn't recall now. Probably deleted it, and now his simile was shot to hell. Dammit. Double dammit.

So instead he reached into the bowl of candy with a challenging smirk twisting his lips, pulled out the last cherry jolly rancher with dexterous fingers, unwrapped it with a quick twist, and popped it into his mouth. It was too sweet and it tasted like cough medicine, but he wrapped it around his tongue anyway and was rewarded by surprise and—curiosity, _curiosity_, in the director's greengrey eyes. He felt like whooping.

"Come along, Sherlock," Mycroft said loftily, and he flinched at how very patronizing it sounded. He sounded like a disobedient dog, and the director—Watson, according to his black nametag, Dr. Watson—thinking that of him was somehow completely unacceptable.

"I'm sorry," he growled lowly. "I couldn't see the doorway around your rolls of fat."

Mycroft glared, Sherlock scowled, and Dr. Watson—his object of affection, Dr. Watson, looked at him with a cherry-red grin and winked.

He grinned. At Sherlock's joke.

Suddenly, there was hope and anxiety and possibility and that damned hope again clutching at his chest.

_'I wonder if he likes crime scenes.'_


End file.
